The Hidden Oasis (68 page)

‘The ladder of Nut,’ she murmured, recalling the inscription she and Flin had found back in Abydos.

‘Very strong,’ said Zahir, coming up to the base of the cliff and giving the bottommost of the ladders a hard yank, demonstrating how its frame had been secured to bronze spikes driven deep into the bare rock. ‘My family use many hundred year. We fix. We keep good. Long climb, but safe climb. Now go!’

He stood away from the ladder and waved Freya onto it, jabbing a thumb upwards, indicating that she should start ascending.

‘What about you?’

‘I wait
sais
Brodie. We climb together. Go, go.’

She tried to argue, but he was having none of it – ‘I climb
fast,’ he insisted, ‘like monkey’ – and so she did as he said. Stepping onto the ladder, she began her ascent. Zahir’s brother followed on behind, his rifle slung over his shoulder, the two of them clambering upwards from rung to rung, steadily pulling themselves away from the valley floor. The cliff face trembled and shivered like the flank of some distressed animal, but the ladders held firm and as she grew more confident in their strength Freya moved faster, the figure of Zahir falling away below, more and more of the gorge coming into view behind. More and more chaos and destruction.

She’d ascended about twenty metres, the length of four ladders, straight up, and was just starting on the fifth set of steps when the cliff gave a violent lurch. On the periphery of her vision, she caught movement above. Years of climbing experience had sharpened her reactions and instinctively she pressed herself flat against the ladder, jamming her head between two of the rungs so as to give it as much protection as possible. A shower of small rocks and pebbles clattered down onto her shoulders followed by three or four much larger chunks of stone which missed her by what felt like centimetres. She remained motionless, clamped to the ladder, waiting to see if the rock fall would continue. Aside from a few more sprays of gravel, that appeared to be it. Cautiously, she eased herself backwards, looking first up and then down.

‘You OK?’ she shouted to Said, who was a few metres below her.

He raised a hand to show he was unharmed. She started to look away, ready to resume the climb, then jerked round again, leaning further out from the cliff, eyes zeroing in on the ground below.

‘Oh no! Oh please God no!’

Said must have seen what she had seen because he had already started back down the ladder, waving at her to continue climbing. She ignored him, following him down, scrambling as fast as she could. The roar of the cliffs, the trembling of the rock face, the collapse of the oasis – everything receded as her entire world narrowed to the small patch of ground beneath, where Zahir lay prone beneath a car-bonnet-sized slab of rock.

She came to within a few metres of the valley floor and jumped. Slamming onto the sand, she scrabbled her way over to Said who was kneeling beside his brother. He was pinioned from the chest down, alive, but only just. His fingers clawed weakly at the top of the rock and a thin trickle of blood crept from the corner of his mouth.

‘We’ve got to get it off him,’ Freya cried, forcing her hands underneath the slab, straining to lift it.

Said just knelt there, stroking his brother’s forehead, his face set and expressionless. Only his eyes registered any emotion, gave any hint of the torment he must have felt to see his brother crushed and trapped like that.

‘Help me, Said,’ Freya groaned. ‘Please, we’ve got to get it off him. We have to get him out.’

It was futile and she knew it, had known from the moment she’d first seen what had happened. The slab was far too heavy, and even if by some miracle they
did
manage to move it there was no way they were going to get Zahir up 200 metres of vertical cliff and out of the oasis, not with the sort of injuries he’d be carrying. Despite that she continued to heave at the stone, her eyes blurring with tears, until eventually Zahir’s hand crept across the surface of the rock
and, clasping hers, moved it away. His head shook slightly as if to say: ‘It’s no use. Don’t waste your energy.’

‘Oh God, Zahir,’ she choked.

He gave her hand a feeble squeeze and, rolling his eyes, looked up at his brother, spoke to him in Arabic, his voice a barely audible rasp, bubbles of mucousy blood popping from his nostrils. Although she couldn’t understand what he was saying, Freya caught the word ‘Mohsen’ – his son’s name – repeated several times and knew instinctively that he was making final arrangements, entrusting his family to Said’s care.

‘Oh God, Zahir,’ she repeated helplessly, holding his hand in hers, stroking it. Tears were now rolling down her face – tears of impotence, of sorrow, of guilt at all the doubts she had had about him, all the bad things she had thought and said, when all along he had been a good man, an honest man. A man who had given his life to save hers. She had wronged him, just as she had wronged her sister. And just as she had failed to help Alex in her hour of need, it seemed to her now that she was failing Zahir too, so that all she could do was to stroke his hand, and sob, and hate herself for the damage she always seemed to cause to those who did the most to help her.

Why do I always get it so wrong?
she thought.
And why is it always the good people who end up paying for my mistakes?

Zahir seemed to understand what was going through her mind because his head came up slightly.

‘Is OK, Miss Freya,’ he said, his voice now no more than a faltering croak. ‘You my good friend.’

‘I’m sorry, Zahir,’ she cried. ‘We’ll get you out. I promise we’ll get you out.’

She started yanking at the rock again. Not because she thought she had any chance of moving it, but because it was so unbearable to do nothing, simply watch as his life slowly trickled away in front of her. Again Zahir shook his head and pushed her hand aside, mumbling something as he did so. His voice was too weak, the background noise too overwhelming for her to catch what he was saying. She bent right down, bringing her ear within an inch of his bloodied mouth.

‘She happy.’

‘What?’

His hand tightened around hers.

‘She happy,’ he repeated, an urgency to his voice, as if he was channelling what small reserves of energy he still possessed into making himself heard and understood. ‘She very happy.’

‘Who, Zahir? Who’s happy?’

‘Doctor Alex,’ he croaked. ‘Doctor Alex very happy.’

He’s delirious,
she thought,
drifting into some imaginary twilight world between life and death.
Zahir tightened his grip further as if to show her that this was not the case, that he knew exactly what he was saying. Around them the oasis seemed momentarily to fall still and silent, although whether it was really happening or her senses were simply so focused on the figure lying beside her that everything else had been shunted away beyond the margins of consciousness Freya couldn’t tell.

‘I don’t understand,’ she pleaded. ‘What do you mean Alex is happy?’

‘In Dakhla,’ he wheezed, seeking out her eyes, holding them, trying to explain. ‘You ask if Doctor Alex
happy. When you come first day. You ask if she happy?’

Freya’s mind spun back, through all the turmoil of recent events, to that first morning in Dakhla, before any of this had started. Zahir had taken her to his house for tea, she had gone into the wrong room, found the picture of Alex on the wall, he had surprised her.

‘Was she happy?’ she had asked him. ‘At the end. Was my sister happy?’

‘She very happy,’ whispered Zahir, fighting to get the words out. ‘We bring her here. To oasis. When she ill. We use rope, carry her down, she see with own eyes.’ Despite the agony he must have been in, he smiled. ‘She very happy. She happiest person in world.’

And now Freya’s mind was spinning again, something pulling at it, some vague memory, some connection demanding to be made. Her thoughts whirred and tumbled before suddenly Alex’s voice echoed inside her head, as clear and strong as if her sister had been standing right there beside her. The words she had written to Freya in that last letter, the one she had sent just before her death:

And Freya realized that this was what Alex had been talking about all along: not some abstract recollection of a shared childhood fantasy, but something real, something tangible – her visit to the oasis with Zahir. Her last great journey. And while the pain of her sister’s murder remained as intense as ever, beside it there was now something else, a glimmer of light. For she knew how much joy it would have brought Alex to see this place, how excited she would have been by it, how very happy and fulfilled it would have made her in her final days. As Alex herself had put it:
When you’ve seen that secret world you can’t help but feel hope.

‘Thank you, Zahir,’ she sobbed, clasping his hand, stroking his forehead, barely noticing as the thundering roar of shifting rock started up again around them. ‘Thank you for helping her. Thank you for everything.’

A pause, then:

‘You are as great a Bedouin as your ancestor Mohammed Wald Yusuf Ibrahim Sabri al-Rashaayda.’

How she remembered the name she had no idea, but his smile widened, the expression barely visible beneath the surgeon’s mask of blood that now covered the lower part of his face. He squeezed her hand again, his strength spent, his eyes starting to dim. With a final effort of will, he pulled his hand free and started pawing at his
djellaba,
slowly dragging the material out from beneath the rock until he had found its pocket. He fumbled inside and removed something, pressing it into Freya’s palm. It was a
green metal compass, chipped and heavily used, with a folding lid and a brass sighting wire on top. She knew immediately that it was her sister’s, the one she had taken with her on her rambles around Markham County, that had once belonged to a marine in the battle of Iwo Jima.

‘Doctor Alex give me,’ Zahir whispered. ‘Before she die. Now belong you.’

Freya gazed down at it, oblivious to the raging of the oasis around them. Flipping open the compass’s lid, she saw a pair of initials scraped into the metal on its underside: AH. Alexandra Hannen. She smiled and looked back at Zahir, started to thank him again, but in the few seconds her attention had been away his head had dropped to one side and his breathing had stopped.

‘He go,’ said Said simply. Reaching out, he smoothed his hand across his brother’s face, closing his eyes.

‘Oh Zahir,’ choked Freya.

For a moment they just knelt there, the ground quaking beneath them, the gorge walls lurching ever closer together, what looked like bolts of crimson lightning erupting from the top of the temple platform. Then, standing, Said motioned her back towards the cliff.

‘But we can’t just leave him,’ Freya pleaded. ‘Not like this.’

‘He safe. He happy. This good place for Bedouin.’

Still she remained where she was, forcing Said to lean down and take her arm and pull her to her feet.

‘My brother come here help you. He no want you die. Please, come, climb. For him.’

Freya couldn’t argue with that and after gazing at Zahir’s broken body for a few seconds longer, she turned and
hurried back to the base of the cliff. Said had already leapt onto the bottommost ladder and was swarming up ahead of her.

‘I go first,’ he shouted. ‘Make sure is no broken.’

‘What about Flin?’ she yelled up at him.

He leant out and pointed back across the stretch of open ground in front of the cliff. The Englishman was running towards them, waving his arms madly, urging them to get climbing.

‘You follow me,’ Said shouted. ‘OK?’

‘OK,’ she called.

The Egyptian nodded, turned and started up the ladder, moving with feline speed and agility, his feet and hands barely seeming to make contact with each rung as he flew upwards. Freya hovered a few moments longer, not wanting to leave Flin too far behind. Then, with a final glance back at Zahir’s body and a murmured ‘Allez’, she grasped the ladder and started to climb.

All the way down from the temple platform Flin had been bellowing at the figures below, yelling at them to get moving, unable to understand why they were just kneeling there. It was only as he came up to the base of the cliff and saw Zahir’s body pinioned beneath the rock that the reason became apparent. He slowed to a halt, looking down and shaking his head, feeling many of the same things Freya had felt – sadness, helplessness, guilt at the way he had spoken to Zahir in his home in Dakhla. There was no time for proper contemplation nor to pay his respects in the way
he would have liked. Dropping to one knee, he touched a hand to Zahir’s forehead and murmured a traditional Bedouin farewell. Then, jumping up again, he sprang over to the cliff and started to climb. The gorge’s walls were now less than 150 metres apart, the air filling with surging wafts of dust and grit, the oasis growing steadily darker.